If Ukraine Won't Do Fake Biden Investigations, Senate Republicans Will DO 'EM THEIRSELF!

Here's an update on a story Liz told y'all yesterday, of how within split seconds of the Senate voting to give Donald Trump carte blanche to commit a whole bunch more crimes to help him steal elections, the Senate's various committees leapt into action to help Trump get the sweet-ass Biden investigations he's been demanding from Ukraine and anybody else who will listen. Because it's definitely important to invent new #BenghaziEmails investigations against Biden, who might still become the Democratic nominee, even if those fake investigations were birthed directly out of Chuck Grassley's cowhole, and even if literally everybody who has looked at Biden Ukraine issues has determined that while Hunter Biden might have been trading off his family name a wee teensy, Joe Biden's successful efforts to get a corrupt prosecutor removed with the backing of the entire western world were on the up-and-up, there's no "there" there, and no crimes were committed.

Yahoo! News reports that the Treasury Department is being very helpful, handing the GOP-led committees "'evidence' of questionable origin," as one Democratic senator calls it, on Hunter Biden's financial dealings and what size jockstrap does Hunter Biden wear and was he home alone THE WHOLE NIGHT Hillary did Benghazi?

Senators like Grassley (R-Corns and Butters) and Ron Johnson (R-Ukraine scandal) are sending letters demanding to know about Hunter Biden's "conflicts of interest" (because of his longstanding job at the governmental agency of He Doesn't Work There), and they're sending them to just errbody: State, Treasury, the Secret Service, Justice, the National Archives, and probably your mom, because of her well known "conflict of interest" with Hunter Biden, ew your mom should stop conflicting Hunter Biden right in his interests, your mom is gross.

And Munch's Treasury Department is delivering! Stuff that is probably bullshit! That sounds like it might have come from one of Rudy Giuliani's fever dream calligraphy binders marked "White House"! How did that shit get into the Treasury Department's files! Allegedly!

Grassley and Johnson have sought to obtain some of the most sensitive and closely held documents in all of federal law enforcement — highly confidential suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by financial institutions with FinCEN, an agency of the Treasury that helps to police money laundering.

The senators' requests to the Treasury have borne fruit, according to the ranking Democratic senator on the Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, who contrasted the cooperation given to the Republican senators with the pervasive White House-directed stonewall that House Democrats encountered when they subpoenaed documents and witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.

"Applying a blatant double standard, Trump administration agencies like the Treasury Department are rapidly complying with Senate Republican requests — no subpoenas necessary — and producing 'evidence' of questionable origin," Wyden spokesperson Ashley Schapitl said in a statement. "The administration told House Democrats to go pound sand when their oversight authority was mandatory while voluntarily cooperating with the Senate Republicans' sideshow at lightning speed."

Well yeah. Of course they're going to give up whatever they have on the Bidens, even if they don't actually have anything. It takes a whole swamp to do cover-ups for Donald Trump, after all. And if Democrats have requests? Fuck them, those little Marie Yovanovitches, trying to fight real corruption. That is not how things work in Trump's America.

Yahoo! quotes Republican sources who say this is too kosher, because after all, Chuck Grassley has been up the butter cow's ass of investigating fake Democrat/Ukraine collusion in the 2016 election (a story which is, itself, a combination of particularly stupid lies and Russian propaganda) since all the way back in 2017, when he sent a letter to the Department of Justice demanding to know the real truth about Ken Vogel's shit reporting about Ukrainians who said mean things about Trump on Facebook and thereby tanked his election chances by accidentally letting him win the election.

So don't you complain about Trump's government being hoppy skippy jumpy to help Republicans gin up fake scandals to help Trump win re-election while ignoring the Democrats, and please don't note that the Senate Republican fake Biden/Ukraine collusion investigations are the same fake Biden/Ukraine collusion investigations Trump and Rudy Giuliani have been extorting Ukraine for, and the same fake Biden/Ukraine collusion investigations Russia was probably looking for fake evidence on when it recently hacked Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.

"Republicans are turning the Senate into an arm of the president's political campaign, pursuing an investigation designed to further President Trump's favorite conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and smear Vice President Biden," Schapitl said.

Ayup.

Are the Republican senators finding anything? Probably not. But when has that ever stopped them from pretending they have and going on Fox News and screaming random word-sounds at Sean Hannity, who will then repeat the very same random word-sounds for all eternity? For evidence of that, simply turn on Fox News and drink every time you hear PETER STRZOK! and LISA PAGE! and then promptly die of alcohol poisoning by dinnertime.

(RIP you, you should not have taken that Double Dare physical challenge from Wonkette, but you brought it on yourself.)

But while we're on the subject of SARs from FinCEN, hey remember that time Deutsche Bank found all that suspicious activity in accounts linked to Trump and Jared Kushner, but after some reshuffling of the decks, decided not to submit those SARs to Treasury after all for definitely very good reasons? Remember all the insane court fights Trump is still waging to keep his finances and his taxes away from the prying eyes of Congress and the American people? Remember how there was another whistleblower we haven't heard so much about, from Treasury, who seems to allege that something real hinky has been going on with Trump's tax audits?

And while we're on the subject of grifters, if Hunter Biden is indeed a grifter, and it kinda sounds like he just might be, remember all those times Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner STILL WORK AT THE WHITE HOUSE, and how Donald Trump Jr. jets around on the taxpayer dime and goes on Fox News saying he just wishes his name was "Hunter Biden," because then he probably would have a good face and not the badly drawn face God gave him to celebrate #PicassoDay in heaven MILLIONS OF DOLLARS?

Remember how Eric Trump tells these same lies on Fox News about how he and Dumbface "got out of all international business" when Daddy was "elected"? As Liz wrote a few months ago, this is all totally true, except for all these asterisks:

If you don't count the Trump Residences Lido in Jakarta, the Trump condos going up in New Delhi, the recently approved expansion to Trump Turnberry in Scotland (which is being propped up with US tax dollars since our servicemembers started getting parked there on fueling stops), the Doonbeg expansion, and the Chinese trademarks Ivanka seems to get approved during trade negotiations. Oh, and there was the abortive effort to seize the G7 and host it at Doral in the off season.

But other than that, the Trump boys are just wishin' and hopin' Joe Biden had spermed them, because maybe then they would have regular human faces not currently be so pauper-ly.

In summary and in conclusion, the various agencies of Trump's criminal regime are working with Trump's Republican protectors in the Senate to do the same shit Trump got impeached for with Ukraine, and which Russia is almost certainly doing for Trump right this very second.

In related news, here's Adam Schiff telling Rachel Maddow about how the intelligence community, particularly the NSA, has been refusing to give Congress important evidence related to Trump's Ukraine crimes: